Treitz, that is a character mismatch between differnet versions of OSs that mostly happens with apostrophes, but also with most accented characters. I deal with that kind of crap on a daily basis in my work. This one is mostly caused by people using keyboard layouts that use a single quote interchangably with apostrophes. As Americans, you guys rarely get to see this since you only use a very limited part of the total character sets available to you

That is exactly it Treitz. The old Forum software probably used a different character set encoding scheme than the new one. I "suspect" that you propably did some cut & paste for the list of equipment from different posts. Some had the apostrophes created as single quotes and others as true apostrophes. Tough they look identical on screen, they are 2 different characters as far as the character set goes. When the Forum got converted, it probably went from 1 character set to the other and since only the true apostrophes got converted to apostrophes, the single quotes probably got converted to the "arabic" you see in the new forum.

In my job I deal with 17 different languages every day and each language has its own specific charactetr set, most of which are combined into 1 "master" or 'universal' character set. The main problem lies in that whenever Microsoft or Apple or one of the Linux OS suppliers upgrades the OS, they change the default "master" character set ever so slightly (they just can't resist screwing around with what already works). For US English Americans use only about 96 of the 4000+ characters in the "master" character set. This "master" set is divided into dozens of keyboard layouts to accomodate the characters most often used by different languages. Now, imagine a Spanish user who types a document in English using a North American Spanish keyboard layout and uses characters which are normally used in English but placed in a different location on the US English keyboard. The actual code the keyboard is different from the US English keyboard one, but it looks identical on the screen, so no one knows the difference. Many users also use, without knowing it because the computer manufacturer decided to use it as the default, an "international" keyboard layout that also has this same issue.

Long technical explaination I know, but not to worry, it is something that you may have just seen for the first time, but as time progresses you will see it again I'm sure until everyone agrees one 1 single standard character set.

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